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I spent a very interesting day at Halliwells' offices in Manchester today listening to Andrew Fraley on time limited mediation. My father, who was a schoolmaster, often remarked that the best teacher training manual that he had ever read was Nicolò Machiavelli's "Prince". After hearing Andrew, I have to conclude that mediation is pretty Machiavellian as well.Andrew's rates for what he calls a "Mediated Settlement Conference" are £495.00 + VAT per party. These can last anything from 40 minutes to 6 hours. He walked us through a typical mediation from the moment he arrives at the reception of the venue genially wishing everyone who comes in "good morning" to the time he draws up heads of agreement. He keeps formal joint sessions to a minimum, rarely reads papers and concentrates entirely on the process of dispute resolution at the expense of the content of a dispute. He begins the process by asking the parties what they want to achieve from the mediation by the end of the day. This is followed by the question "and what else?" That in turn is followed by "and what else" until the parties are left exhausted.Usually the dispute is about money. There, the mediator's job is to bridge a divide between the lowest that the claimant will accept and the most that the defendant is willing to offer. A party's insistence that he won't settle for a penny more (or less as the case may be) opens up a wonderful opportunity to jump to the bottom line.Much of Andrew's wisdom is on his website at http://www.andrew-fraley.com/. There is a lot of good stuff there including his "Mediation Overview", "Agreement to Mediate", "Case Preparation" notes and "Agreement".

What the Appeal was about
The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co ("Lilly") has developed a drug called pemetrexed which it markets under the brand name Alimta for the treatment of various types of cancer. Used on its own, pemetrexed has unpleasant side effects that can sometimes be fatal but these can be avoided when it is administered as a compound called pemetrexed disodium in combination with vitamin B12.

The use of pemetrexed disodium in the manufacture of a medicament for use in combination with vitamin B12 (and, optionally, folic acid) for the treatment of cancer is monopolized in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain and a number of other European countries by European patent number No 1 313 508. There are also corresponding patents for the same invention in many other countries around the world.

Until the Civil Procedure Rules ("CPR") came into force in 1999 solicitors specializing in intellectual property law heralded litigation with an ultimatum called a letter before action. Written in haughty if not insulting terms and accompanied by a humiliating form of undertakings, they were intended to shock the recipient into submission. They rarely achieved the desired result. As often as not they were simply ignored. Occasionally, they were answered by a defiant response. As a result, a lot of actions were launched that could easily have been settled without recourse to litigation.

"The objective of the Practice Direction and the Pre-Action Protocols is to enable the parties to identify the issues in dispute and, wherever possible, to resolve them through negotiation or some other fo…

Ms LaBau blogs about cakes and desserts in her SugarHero! blog. One of her confections is "Snow Globe Cupcakes with Gelatin Bubbles". The BBC reports that Ms LaBau does not complain that copying her recipe infringed her copyright as "it is almost impossible to claim copyright over a list of ingredients" but she does object to the copying of a video explaining how to make the cupcakes,…